Bruce Willis Joins Sci-Fi Sexbot Thriller Vice

Original science fiction is hard to come by these days. While movies like Gravity and Her are breaking box office records and gaining critical success, a majority of sci-fi movies these days are action/adventures, reboots, and remakes. While a good healthy dose of action is a good thing, a well-rounded diet of original content is also welcomed. Enter producers Randall Emmett and George Furla, the producing team behind the war movie Lone Survivor, who are capitalizing on that film’s success with a new science fiction thriller called Vice.

According to THR, Vice recently cast actor Bruce Willis in one of its starring roles. From writers Andre Fabrizio and Jeremy Passmore, Vice takes place in the near future where synthetic humanoids are part of society. Willis will play the owner of an “anything goes pseudo-paradise” resort/brothel that caters in sex with these realistic androids. Actress Ambyr Childers will co-star in Vice, playing a sexbot who regains its memories after it experiences a glitch at the end of the night. Now with memories intact, the synthetic seeks revenge after realizing the horrors that been inflicted on her.

Vice is described as having “a Westworld-meets-Grand Theft Auto vibe.” For the uninitiated, Westworld is a 1973 sci-fi movie that follows a pair of rich vacationers who travel to a resort to live out their kooky fantasies through robot technology. After the resort’s computer system breaks down, the pair is stalked by a malfunctioning, gun-slinging robot cowboy.

Vice sounds a bit like an episode of Almost Human or Joss Whedon’s short-lived TV series Dollhouse. It seems like Bruce Willis will do anything for a big paycheck these days, so it’s unclear on the overall quality of the film until we see something solid. While Willis can be good in big-budget genre movies such as Rian Johnson’s Looper, he has a tendency to sleepwalk through movies such as A Good Day to Die Hard, RED 2, and G.I. Joe: Retaliation. As for Ambyr Childers, she was good in the horror film We Are What We Are (although I prefer the original) and the action film 2 Guns last year. Childers also had a small role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master as Lancaster Dodd’s (Philip Seymour Hoffman) daughter, Elizabeth.

Screenwriters Andre Fabrizio and Jeremy Passmore wrote the earthquake disaster film San Andreas, which stars Dwayne Johnson and will begin production later this year. The pair also wrote the film Prince for director Brian A. Miller (House of the Rising Sun), which also starred Bruce Willis, along with John Cusack, Jason Patric, and Jessica Lowndes. Producers Randall Emmett and George Furla produced the films Lone Survivor, 2 Guns, Broken City, and Alex Cross. It looks like they mostly deal with gritty, pulpy crime genre movies of varying degrees of quality.

Vice is currently looking for more funding and a director. It’s unclear when the film would be released, but it’s most likely that it would open sometime in late 2015 or early 2016.